FLEXIBILITY, BUT FOR WHOM? DEMANDS RAISED BY DEVELOPMENT CIRCLES AND LABOR UNIONS ON THE GATS NEGOTIATIONS IN THE WTO PETER FUCHS In the course of the past two years the General Agreement on Trade in Services(GATS) has be­come a central issue in the debate over the future of the international trade system. The GATS is seen by the World Trade Organization(WTO), industry representatives, and many WTO member states as a particularly'flexible' and'develop­ment-friendly' agreement; on the other hand, the GATS has come in for harsh criticism from labor unions, development circles, and globalization skeptics. Information on the GATS and the nume­rous concerns voiced by development circles and labor unions were the subject of a seminar held by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the WTO from 24-26 April 2003 in Geneva. The present paper sums up some of the central aspects of the seminar and outlines the state of the discussion a few months prior to the Fifth WTO Ministerial Conference in Cancun/Mexico. The present state of the GATS talks At the Fourth WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha/Qatar in November 2001, the GATS negotiations, which got underway in 2000, were integrated in the agenda of the ongoing, wide ­ranging World Trade Round. This trade round, adroitly referred to in official circles as"the Doha Development Agenda" or the"Development Round," aims ostensibly to improve the integra ­tion of developing countries in world trade. In fact, however, no substantial concessions have yet been made to the developing countries, and none of the deadlines set for agreement on important development-related issues – e.g. TRIPS and health, the concerns of developing countries regarding implementation, or the question of agricultural trade – have been met. Only the GATS talks can be said to have made relatively good headway: aside from a number of working groups on horizontal GATS issues, the GATS negotiations have dealt mainly with the so­called request-offer process, in which WTO mem­bers negotiate bilaterally on requests and offers on liberalization in services. By the end of June 2002 WTO members states with offensive inte­rests in the GATS talks had submitted their first request papers to other WTO members. The EU, for instance, has submitted requests to 109 other WTO members and received in return 35 requests from other countries(27 of them developing countries). By the end of March 2003 WTO